Nineteen Years In

Well, it’s time to face facts. This blog is probably on its last legs.

It hasn’t seen a lot of updates in the last year. It’s not likely to see many more. Well, nineteen years is a long time, and I feel quite frequently that I really don’t have much more to say on MMOs.

But I still play. Again, not as frequently as I had in the day, but I play. So it’s worth taking a look at the previous year to see where things are at.

Guess I’ll start with Star Citizen. It’s easy to take shots at it, given its business model and the apparent lack of progress-except, it really wasn’t a big lack this year. The big one was the Persistent Entity Streaming patch, which allowed just about every object in the game to stick around for as long as the character did in a server-and potentially longer if the server managed to still be around when the player logged back in. This came in with a cargo refactor which allowed cargo boxes to actually be moved around. Then the long delayed salvage gameplay came in. Then ship-based tractor beams capable of hauling ships. The cargo refactor also made piracy a valid profession instead of the “I’ll kill ships and call myself a pirate hr hr hr.” Racetracks became a thing for racing ships. And the annual CitizenCon announced that the single player game of Squadron 42 is “feature complete”, leading to a polishing phase. (What that might mean or how long it may take is probably going to be longer than a lot of people are hoping.) Bigger still, the star system of Pyro, the second system that will be released for the game, was revealed and players were able to do some testing in that system; it’s not impossible to believe that Pyro may be ready for the general playerbase this year. (We’ve heard that before, of course.) It’ll be interesting to see if the goodwill gained during the presentations will still be there by next October. As for my own playing time, I’ve kept exploring a great deal of the various types of gameplay that currently exists. While I’m not a big miner, and I don’t really do the pirate/PvP thing, I indulged in cargo hauling, salvaging, and of course, shooting things in space and on the ground. I’m clearly not leaving SC anytime soon-unless my SSD finally finds itself unable to hold both Windows and SC. (This is a real concern of mine.)

Star Trek Online picks up the next spot. The biggest news was its sale from Perfect World Entertainment to Gearbox. Content-wise…there wasn’t a lot. I think there was maybe three episodes released through last year, and it felt like even the lockboxes weren’t being produced at the same rate. Rumors about that Cryptic-the developers who keep trekking along-are dealing with layoffs or preparing for them. Their fourteenth anniversary is upcoming in less than a week, along with a new episode, but one can’t help but wonder if the game is drifting into a pseudo maintenance mode. With PWE, that wouldn’t be that big a deal; they kept Champions Online afloat for years, after all. But Gearbox may be another story-and I keep hearing that they’re having issues, too. We could be looking at a rocky year for STO. Despite this, I keep playing primarily during my Twitch stream, having spent most of the year playing a Starfleet TOS Science captain.

The biggest news for my gameplaying came just a couple of weeks ago, when the Homecoming servers of City of Heroes announced that they had been given a license to run the venerable MMORPG by NCSoft. That news probably can’t be understated. This made the game legal again, and I’ve dabbled a bit in streaming it now that I don’t feel like I’m advertising an illegal server. (Playing on one didn’t bother me-I have the client software; my brain is weird sometimes.) With this announcement, it looks like the Homecoming devs are going to be putting out some delayed content. How much they’ll put out over the next year is an open question, but I’m not sure the players mind. In addition to my stream, I continue to run with villains on a weekly basis with a less than semi-competent group of bad guys. (I’d refer to them as semi-competent, but these days, they seem to be dropping half of that phrase-it’s not the “semi” part. :D)

The one thing that isn’t likely to see much development in the next year is this blog. It’s been getting pretty obvious that it’s not getting updated regularly, and I have a hard time seeing myself ramping up all that hard for it. I was all set to announce that I was going to close the blog down for good with this post, but I figure I should at least try to get it to twenty years. It’s a nice round number, after all. We’ll see how it shakes out.

Here’s to a good 2024.

Dumpster Fires

(Obviously, anyone expecting weekly or even monthly updates on this blog was probably highly optimistic.)

So. Star Citizen released its 3.18 patch a couple of weeks ago. Everything worked perfectly and was widely acclaimed as the best patch any company has ever released.

And then I woke up.

If you’re reading this blog, then you probably have read other gaming sites that have described the patch as a complete and utter disaster. While that might be slightly overstating things, I have been heard to remark that, while in the past I would say the game has more bugs than a Starship Troopers movie, now I have to say it has more bugs than the entire Starship Troopers franchise.

For most of the time since its release, I wasn’t able to even log into the game. This was not a unique experience. Posts on the official forums lit up. Gaming sites sat back to watch and eat popcorn. Cats and dogs were living in sin together. Marshmallow men started to wander the streets. (The last two may have been made up. Maybe.)

In some ways, though, this wasn’t completely unexpected. 3.18 was pitched as one of the most significant ones since…maybe 3.0? It was so big a deal that it threw off the quarterly big patch cadence; we had exactly one major patch last year. (This year isn’t looking great either, although we might get three.) It was going to introduce Persistent Entity Streaming, which would allow ships and inventory items to be dropped anywhere…and stay at those dropped locations until someone else came along and acted upon it. I’m still dubious on how that will ultimately work out, given game population and the sheer volume of stuff they can be carrying with them. Not to mention the volume of medical gowns that shows up every time a character respawns after having been killed off.

But I can definitely say that it works. There was a limit previous to this that only allowed three vehicles for a player to be spawned in at once. I was able to spawn in six recently-and most of them I left at an outpost until I returned an hour later, to find them still there. (Two were in bad shape; I think some wind blew ship wreckage on top of them with predictable results.) This is a big deal-there are ship concepts still on the drawing board that will need to be able to carry heaps of vehicles, and while it’s silly to assume they’d all belong to the same player…well, some people go crazy in SC.

This change also allowed the game to do something that the developers have been promising for years, something that kept getting pushed back, and back, and back: the first iteration of salvaging gameplay. You can strip the hull off of wrecked ships now, where you generate recycled material to sell at the various trade kiosks around the star system. Anyone can do this with a hand tool-in fact, the small canisters can even be used to take that recycled material and do some spot repairs on your own damaged ship. (It won’t reattach a wing, but it can likely at least cover up the exposed metal framework.) But it really shines with the salvaging ships in the game, one of which has been actually in game for a few years at least, and the other just recently released with this patch. (I can’t speak to how effective they are-they aren’t ships I have.)

It’s still the first iteration, so the heavy duty salvaging is still on the horizon. But as the mining gameplay loop shows, the devs will likely iterate on it hard.

These are just a couple of the most significant changes in the patch. But…I did use the phrase “dumpster fire” in the title, right? Even though people are having better luck logging in, there are still plenty of challenges. Missions may not actually be accepted when you accept them in the contract manager; it lags like crazy sometimes. Speaking of lag, bounty targets aren’t having their “neutralize target’ marker on them right away all of the time, which means if you kill them off beforehand, you don’t get paid, and you fail the mission to boot. (Technically, it’s “incomplete”, but it’s likely to go away when you log off, which is effectively failing the mission anyway.) More problematic is the fact that hangars at various landing sites don’t acknowledge your requests for landing sites; there’s a workaround, but sometimes that workaround doesn’t work. This can be a problem if you need fuel badly, or worse yet, are about to dehydrate to death and NEED to get inside to buy a drink. Starship claims are a little tricky, as well as storage of those ships. And these are just the things I personally experienced in my limited amount of time I’ve had since being able to log in again.

The devs, fortunately, are aware of all of this, and have been working. The fact that I can log in now more or less consistently is proof of this. There’s a 3.18.1 patch on the immediate horizon that will (hopefully) address some of the more critical bugs. Maybe, maybe not, but we’ll find out. Once the more critical bugs are taken care of, we should be able to get back to the “film” instead of “franchise” comment about the bugs in the game. There are still things I really want to try out that came in the patch, like the starship race tracks (which I will undoubtedly wreck on more often than not, because I suck at racing) and the changes in how cargo hauling (where the cargo can be interacted with now-which makes piracy possible).

The devs are going to want to make sure things are running relatively smooth real soon; after all, May is when they do their big Invictis Launch Week sales and free-flights for people who haven’t backed the game; being unable to log in would be a very bad look for prospective customers….

Eighteen Years In

Well, the blog’s been irregular as…you know, I’m not actually going to complete that joke. That’s going to places I fear to tread.

Despite this irregularity-and despite that I didn’t make an entry for last year-I’m at least gonna take a look back at 2022 for the eighteenth anniversary of this blog. If the blog were a person, it’d be graduating high school now. Scary thought, that.

So, what did I spend my time in?

Slow Year, But Big Income

Star Citizen got the bulk of my time again, but it seems to be suffering from a slowdown in content release-which is not the best look when you’re in active development in an Alpha status. This isn’t to say nothing happened; a number of vehicles were released, ship refueling from other ships happened, more missions added, including another dynamic event. But it was all drip-drip-dripped from April onward. The rationale is that a lot of work is being done for two major bits of technology which-in theory-will dramatically move the chains forward. But the last patch is very overdue (to be fair, if they rushed it live now, it’d be a minor disaster), and one could be tempted to observe that this year’s work had better show some awesome stuff. I stream my gameplay a bit on Saturdays, so to toot my own horn a bit, if one is feeling masochistic to see just what one can do, I’m not hard to find.

Still Boldly Going

Star Trek Online tends to occupy my Wednesday nights, and I’ve been moving along playing the Klingon Warrior J’Dan, who’s nearing the end of his career to open up a slot for a new captain. That plan’s been in the works. As far as the releases for STO, well, it’s marginally better than Star Citizen; they’ve had three “seasons” released, each featuring the ongoing issues with the Mirror Universe and all the troubles that entails; mostly they seem to have one or two episodes and a task force operation. Not much new in the way of mechanics, which may be for the best. And of course, there are regular lockbox updates. I did take some time during the year to actually do that year’s event campaign, which will allow me to choose a ship usually only found in lockboxes-which one, I’ve yet to decide upon. I was going to use it for the next captain, but stuff happened, and I found that I didn’t actually need to do it anymore. Welp-not the first time I’ve out-clevered myself. This is the other game I do on streams, so again, not hard to find me.

It’s So Easy Being Evil…

At this point, despite the lack of any official reactions, I think it’s safe to call the assorted rogue servers in City of Heroes as phoenixes, and not zombies. We’re closing in on four years since the assorted servers were born again, so to speak, and they’re still going strong. I don’t talk much about the assorted servers these days, since I prefer not to be caught up in any drama between them-but if you look back at my posts, you know where I’ve been playing, and it hasn’t changed over time. Again, time constraints limit me to one day a week on this one, and on that day, I work on a villain called the Chronopolitan, a time/beam defender, and he’s in his mid-40’s range. I play him with a group of other villains, and odds are good that when he hits max level, I’ll keep developing him, as I view him as “what if the Doctor had absolutely no scruples?” In other words, he’s been fun to RP. As far as development goes…well, since the servers all go their own way, it’s hard to nail down the assorted changes they’ve gone through. Still, I was always of the opinion that if the game were at least in maintenance mode, I’d still be playing-and that hasn’t changed for me.

As far as other games? I’ve spent some time on Valheim, which took the gaming world by storm a while back, and while I didn’t get involved much with the multiplayer aspect, I did find it as a very fun game, and well worth the relatively cheap price to pick it up on Steam.

As far as this blog goes? It’s still on an irregular status, and who the heck knows when I’m moved to post something. Time’s a lot more limited for me these days, and sitting down to type something out is a bit more challenging than it used to be. But I’m still alive, still kicking, and still playing those MMOs, even eighteen years later. (I try not to dwell on how old that makes me feel sometimes.) If you’re reading this, I do still appreciate you taking a little bit of your time to read what I’m writing, and who knows? Maybe I’ll have more to say as this year goes on. At worse, I should be here this time next year for 19!

Dynamics

One of the questions I see tossed off every so often about Star Citizen is, “It looks cool, but what is there to do?” And if the question is thrown in my direction, I mention the whole mining, cargo hauling, mission running, bounty hunting, criminal activity thing. Which is great, as far as it goes. Certainly there’s enough going on that you can change up your gameplay entirely for a while if you feel like it; if you get tired of shooting things in space, you can shoot them on the ground; if you get tired of shooting at all, you can haul cargo.

And there are occasional events that players may run with their organizations or to a wider group-I like to point at the annual Daymar Rally, a race that occurs on the surface of a moon. So really, there is stuff to do. But that isn’t all, these days. Nowadays, the developers have a few more fun things in the toy box.

They’re listed as “dynamic events”, which really aren’t, exactly-and yet, they kind of are. You see, every so often, the developers throw a switch, and one of four different events can kick off-and they’re more involved than the usual missions.

The first was called Xenothreat, after a gang from a neighboring star system (which might even be put into game next year-IT COULD HAPPEN!), who have intruded into the Stanton system (where all the players currently live), and it sets off a conflict that mixes dogfighting, first person shooter gameplay, and even cargo running. I kind of think of this as my favorite one, because it does allow almost all gameplay styles something to do-and it ends with a battle royale against Xenothreat and their capital ships.

After that one came the “Nine-Tails Lockdown”. This one involves a blockade against rapid travel around a space station, and again, it has a couple of ways to participate; you can engage the Nine-Tails pirate gang, or you can deliver medical relief supplies to the locked down station-if you can avoid being shot down! What made this event different was that you could also fight on the side of the Nine-Tails, if you had a criminal status rating. This meant that there was an incentive for PvP activity here, both for criminals getting paid to kill people, and bounty hunters to claim their bounties-as well as earn the money for fighting the Nine-Tails to begin with.

The third event was based on player lore. Once upon a time, there was a drug lab called Jumptown, and it sold highly valuable drugs. It was also a free-fire zone, which meant everyone fought over possession of Jumptown so they could buy the drugs and sell them off. Eventually, drug sales got nerfed hard, and that was that. But the devs created an event they called “Jumptown 2.0”, where a random drug lab would once again spit out highly valuable drugs, and you could either go to confiscate the drugs or distribute them. This was theoretically enabled to recreate the days of crazy PvP violence both in the air and on the ground-but you also had a possibility of winding up on a server where peace was declared, and people would just queue up for the drugs. Just goes to show, you can never predict this community.

The fourth and latest event is the most complicated one they’ve put together yet. The Siege of Orison takes place at the cloud city of Crusader, and those Nine-Tails guys have upped their game by taking over a few of the platforms there. Your job is to go on a ground assault and retake them by disabling the anti-aircraft defenses and kill off the leaders of the attack. Of course, there are heaps of other Nine-Tails guys that would be just as happy to add you to their kill count. This mission involves first person combat, capturing ships to travel between platforms, and hunting down the primary targets before the big boss comes out to play. This one’s mainly a PvE event, but in Star Citizen, if someone can shoot someone else, PvP can happen.

The events never run at the same time (yet), so you usually don’t have to worry about more than one of these kicking off at a time. There’s usually announcements as to when these events are going to happen well in advance, but honestly? Anytime you see a “Priority” style mission on your mission list, something is going on, and they usually pay pretty well. If you want to see and work with other players, these dynamic events are usually a good way to meet people. (And potentially get killed by them; as “Q” would tell you, “It’s not safe out there.”

Wipeout!

No, not THAT kind of wipout….

At the time of this post, Star Citizen will be engaging in that most dreaded of activities: wiping out their database. It’s something that happens every so often during a patch, and it’s not really unusual for a game in an alpha state-their database just has too much corrupted stuff. In theory, it’s something that becomes less necessary as development proceeds from alpha to beta, and from there to release. Certainly by release-the last thing you want to do is invalidate a player’s hard work by kicking them back to square one.

But in an alpha, it’s necessary-and Star Citizen’s isn’t an exception to that rule. What makes it unusual is, of course, the fact that backers can actually play the game as it is being developed. So the removal of nearly everything tends to sting a little more. It used to be more common, honestly-it used to happen with every patch. In the last few years, though, it’s been less frequent-there was even a near 18 month stretch where no wipes happened.

Not everything is lost in these wipes-at least, not now. Long term persistence has come a long way since the earlier days of the game. There’s three basic varieties to go through: inventory, which includes equipment, ship components, and vehicles of all types; wallet, which handles the in-game currency; and reputation, which measures how well you are liked by various in-game entities.

The wipe coming with the imminent patch-3.17.2-will affect two of these. The wallet is history-everyone will be reset to starting values. Likewise, the inventory is history. In some cases, this can be a good thing: after an extended period of time with the inventory system as it currently stands, a player may well have collected a heap of junk. The loss of vehicles-except for what was pledged on the RSI web site-stings a bit more. But reputation will be maintained, and that’s a good thing.

A high reputation means higher paying missions; higher paying missions means faster recovery time from a wipe, where you can get yourself back to a decent amount of currency and on the road to getting back the lost ships-or maybe try out other ones. A wipe can be looked at as an opportunity in this case. It’s a chance to try new vehicles that perhaps went under the radar before.

Of course, none of it means that there won’t be another wipeout in the future. With 4.0 on the horizon next year (we can only hope), a wipe is almost guaranteed; and of course, one can expect a wipe when the game enters beta (and I might be lucky and live long enough to see it happen). And of course, in that far off mythical future, a final wipe for launch.

This kind of thing can make one question, “What’s the point, then? If everything is getting wiped, why bother playing?” Well, that’s going to differ between individuals. For me, though, it’s more about the journey than the destination. Or to be a little less high-class about it: it’s the getting, not the having. It may seem repetitive, but there’s a lot of repetitive stuff in MMOs; why should Star Citizen be different?

Despite the wipe, I’m looking forward to seeing some of the new stuff in the pipe for the new patch, which could land as soon as this week.

Wasted Opportunities

Back in the days before the majority of MMORPGs were free-to-play (or similar), a game might tend to struggled to get new players. After all, you had to get them to buy the game in the first place, and then get hooked enough to pay the subscription fees. So one way they would attempt to get at the theoretical pool of new players would be to have free access for a period of time. Maybe it would be via trial accounts, or maybe it would just make everything open for a week. Didn’t matter-it was a tried and true method to get players to go into your game, and go, “Wow, this is awesome! I’m gonna purchase this so I can keep playing it!” Done correctly, it’s a solid strategy.

But come on. Look at the title of my post. I’m clearly not going to be talking about a success story here. And despite how much I like the game, I’m not going to just ignore problems like this.

The game under discussion here is Star Citizen. And man, does it have a lot of ill-will inertia to overcome to get people invested; the reputation of being a scam (it’s not), the nature of overinflated pricing on ships with real money (they are), and the fact that it’s still years and years away from reaching a completed state (also true). But in order to continue the development, they need that sweet new-player money as much as any subscriber based game did back in the day. So: tried and true method. Ever so often, they do free flight weeks, usually with a limited group of ships-some weeks more limited than others. You would think it would be in their best interest to put their best foot forward.

The best laid plans….

Last week, the game held an annual event referred to the “Invictus Launch Week”, which has a bunch of in-game lore I won’t bore anyone with, but it makes for a convenient time to do a free to play week so people can fly the military-oriented starships (although military ground vehicles are available as well, but let’s be honest-SC is all about the ships). This is something that is known to bring in an influx of people who want to check the game out-especially as the game expands its gameplay. Sounds like a winner, doesn’t it?

But there’s one more inconvenient fact that rears its ugly head-that the game is still in alpha development-which means it has more bugs than a Star-er, I’ve used that joke with my last post. I’d stop falling back on it if it stopped being true. Anyway. To say that the last week was probably a minor disaster would be one of the more accurate things I’ve written lately. Let’s take a look at some of the horrors ahead.

1. The Convention Hall Navigation. This was one of the weeks where you didn’t get the free ships in your hangar to access immediately-you have to go to the convention hall to see the ships to rent them. A good theory. And this was the first year they had the hall at the gas giant of Crusader, in the cloud city of Orison. It showed. Last year, conventions took place somewhere else, and it was an example of doing things right. Primarily by use of signage. Well, they blew it here. There were signs, but no arrows to direct people where to go to get to the hall. There are some maps, but I can tell you from observation that nine times out of ten, nobody bothers to look at the maps-and the maps are only kind-of helpful. So just finding the hall is rough, unless you’re already familiar with the layout of Orison. (Spoiler alert: new players aren’t likely to be familiar with the layout of Orison.)
2. The elevators. This is a bigger problem than just the convention hall, extending to elevators all over, but we’re talking new players right now. When you got to the hall, you had a lobby which had touristy sales stuff (in-game purchases with in-game credits, not real money; it’s sad I have to say that explicitly). To get to the floors with ships, you have to take the elevators. So you press the call button, and one of three things will happen.
   • The elevator will open to reveal the gaseous atmosphere of Crusader. It’s a door with nothing on the other side. You walk into it and you experience the joys of falling through the convention center to your death. Then you respawn at wherever your medical respawn point is.
   • The elevator will open to reveal a void as black as death. Which is convenient, because if you go into it, you get to have the same kind of fun as the previous option.
   • The elevator will open to reveal…and elevator! Congratulations! You’ve almost made it! The reason I say “almost”, however, is that there were periods of time where the only floor you can select in the elevator was the floor you were on-in other words, you couldn’t actually get to the floors with ships to rent. Which kind of makes the whole thing moot.
3. The wallet. Again, this is the in-game wallet with in-game credits in it, not real life wallets. (I have to keep hammering at this. There’s a perception that the only way you get stuff in the game is with real money, and it’s not true.) A bug hit that would, between logins, eliminate chunks of earned credits in the game. Not a huge deal for new players if they’re only here for the free flight-but it looks really bad when they’re deciding if they want to take the plunge on the game. The devs did manage during the week to restore lost credits, but it’s a real bad look.
4. And finally, the biggest (in my opinion) problem: the friends list. When you’re a new player, there’s a better-than-good chance that you’re checking it out on the word of a friend or two. So obviously, you’re going to want to get him on your friends list. It’s a big deal-it allows you to more easily party up with them, it makes it possible to join the same server that they’re playing on (Right now, servers are limited to 50 people. The magic 4.0 patch will change this dramatically, but I’ll believe it when I see it). It’s a big deal. But the backend servers that track this stuff apparently took multiple stretches of hours off, because the friends lists weren’t working. At all. Which made grouping with friends virtually impossible.

So, what does a new player conclude from this? “This game sucks. I’m out of here.” The prospective new player decides the game is a mess and stays away; if they’re kind, they may say they’ll be back when the game’s in a better state. (Don’t get the hopes up.) And the irony is, it actually is in a decent state under most circumstances, but the devs put this up not long after one of their quarterly patches-which had its own issues with bugs-and one can get the feeling that there were a lot more bugs that showed up with the patch that installed the convention center.

And that, in a nutshell, is a wasted opportunity. You don’t want to drive new people away-you want them to see how awesome the game is, which would give the impression that it’s going to get more awesome as time goes on. Not give them the impression that it’s a dumpster fire. If there’s one time you really want things to work right, it’s during your free play weeks, and last week, the developers failed hard.

One hopes that lessons were learned enough for the big November free play period; they really don’t need another experience like this one.

The Lost Year: Star Citizen

The last of my usual MMOs to remark upon is Star Citizen, that game that tends to bring out strong opinions. People will either love it or hate it, and I’m pretty much in the former with no apologies.

For a game that doesn’t (yet) have the depth of the other MMOs I play, I’ve spent a remarkably large amount of time in it-in fact, it’s probably got the majority share in my gaming time from the past year. And while it still has a long way to go to meet the goals that were set for that game years ago, progress is visible. In the last year alone, it got reputation systems in place, an inventory system that’s locked to players, locations, or vehicles, a medical system that’s more than just a sack of health points, widened mission variety, and of course, more ships released. (Of course, they’ve also listed up new concept ships too, so I’m thinking we might be at a net-zero as far as “how many more until the ships are all done”.)

While I haven’t managed to find my preference in gameplay loops-I’ve enjoyed many of them, and that’s a big deal to me; it helped keep me in Star Wars Galaxies back in the day-I have at least managed to nail down the loop that I’ll likely not spend a lot of time in. While I am a competent miner, both in ground vehicles and in space vehicles, I find that I just can’t bring myself to enjoy it. But that’s okay-when I can go onto a moon one day and defend a bunker against bad guys (or kill off the good guys-Hurston Security, I hate you forever), get into a dogfight in the skies above an outpost the next day, and the following day go hauling cargo from the inner moons to the outer planets, and use different ships for each of those days…well, it’s a nice realization that even more loops are coming, some of which I will do and some of which I won’t. (Refueling ships in space from space-tankers is coming VERY soon-may have already done so by the time this post gets released-isn’t in my list, as I have no tankers, but I may well need to refuel at one at somebody else’s at some point.)

The biggest difference between SC and the other MMOs, of course, is that progression is a very limited affair. You can earn credits for more ships in-game, and nowadays you can actually loot first-person shooter equipment at bunker locations, too, but you won’t find much in the way of levels here. Except maybe in the reputation system, which has grown from its initial implementation, and is likely to keep growing as more gameplay loops go in.

Game still has more bugs than a Starship Troopers movie-I’ll always say that if you can’t handle lots of bugs, stay away from SC until at least Beta (sometime in the distant future-I’m betting on 2952). But they aren’t as horrible as one might expect-usually-and there’s a lot of fun to be had playing. And hey-they have free flight events every so often, with one on the docket in a couple weeks. Of course, that tends to add to server loads like crazy as heaps of people come to take a look and discover it not at its best….

Can’t win sometimes, right?

Anyway, still flying, still enjoying myself, and isn’t that the only thing that should matter to me from a game?

Are You Not Entertained? (or: Gladius)

Continuing looks at the various starships in Star Citizen, I thought I’d continue my tour of light fighters with the Aegis Dynamics Gladius fighter.  The Gladius is a ship that is usually at the top of most lists of “best light fighter in the game”, although that title may have been challenged by the Talon fighter.

Just as a quick FYI, every ship I’m posting on is available for purchase in the game with in-game credits.  So when I put up these posts, don’t think I’m hawking a ship to purchase with real money on the RSI store; I will not post my comments on a ship in any detail unless it can be acquired in-game.  Some may require more work to get, but it can be done-all the way up to the luxurious 890 Jump.  (That one I’m saving for much, much later.)

Moving on.  The Gladius is just as maneuverable as the Anvil Arrow, but it has a major advantage over the Arrow:  a second shield generator.  That gives the Gladius a bit more survivability, on top of the speed and maneuvering.  Its weapons match up favorably against the Arrow’s; while the Arrow boasts more guns, the Gladius has larger ones.  It has the same number of missiles too, but a couple are a size larger than what the Arrow uses.  On paper, it seems that the Gladius has it all over the Arrow.  I keep reading at various locations that once armor becomes more physicalized, the Arrow will be a closer match-but at the moment, I’m inclined to view that as a forum rumor more than anything else.  In other words:  I’ll believe it when I see it.

In-game pricing is a bit pricier than the Arrow as well-but it’s certainly achievable, even if you start with the starter ships (as I’ve demonstrated during my Aurora MR Challenge on my streaming channel, which is presently archived on YouTube).  It’ll take very little investment to get a pilot in a fighter that fits the description of space superiority.  If you’re just starting out and looking to spend time dogfighting, the Gladius may well be the ship you’re looking to fly.

Unlike many other starships in Star Citizen, the folks at CIG didn’t seem to have made a commercial to hype this fighter.  So instead, I’ll just leave a helpful link to a vehicle brochure concerning the ship.

Space, The Final Frontier… (or: Constellation)

I had a lot of mixed feelings about the Constellation series of starships in Star Citizen.

I liked the look well enough.  And I liked the fact that there were four variants (although one is not in the game as of this writing-but it is expected later this year-finally).  It’s kind of borderline on size between a medium and a large sized ship; you could look at it as the biggest medium, or the smallest large.  (Although the coming of the Mercury Star Runner kind of makes it mostly a tie for that honor.)  It has a snub ship attached to the aft as well, and its cargo bay (for most variants) can fit a vehicle up to the size of an Ursa Rover (in fact, some of the variants include it in the pledges).  Between a version for hauling cargo, for exploring, for combat ops, or for just acting like a luxury jet liner, there’s a lot to like about the Constellation series.

On paper, anyway.

But in practice, it was a bit of underwhelming.  Shield holes made it painfully easy to blow up the ship.  It couldn’t maneuver well enough to deal with attacking ships.  I rented the Andromeda gunship variant, and it went…poorly.  I wanted to like the Constellation, but I wasn’t horribly impressed.

Until recently, anyway.  Some months later, I was in the middle of streaming an Aurora MR Challenge, to prove to viewers that yes, one can do everything you want to in-game with almost every ship in game without paying out more than the minimum pledge, and one of the stepping stones to gaining the credits to purchase a better ship was to do higher end bounty hunting missions (which at this writing are probably the best way to make credits).  Well, I tried out a couple of rented ships, but on a lark, not expecting much, I decided to rent the Andromeda again.  And changes since the last time improved the experience.  It could maneuver better, the shield holes weren’t as prevalent, and the engines didn’t get blown off anywhere near as easily.  More importantly, I’d improved my ship combat skills in that time, and the firepower at the disposal of the pilot (which doesn’t include the turrets available in most variants) is considerable.  I was waxing large Valkyrie ships inside of ten seconds, and the ship took a beating, but kept working.

I gained a newfound respect for the Andromeda, and used it to complete my Challenge.  While I wouldn’t dream of PvPing in an Andromeda, it was certainly something capable of taking out ships smaller than a Hammerhead gunship.  I’m not sure how much having a pair of turret gunners might impact its utility in that kind of situation, though.  Turret gunning has only relatively recently become a reasonable option, thanks to improvements in targeting tech.  But the turret guns are substantially smaller than the guns controlled by the pilot.

Now, as mentioned, there are three other variants, and the Taurus variant is still on-deck for this year; so I can’t really comment on that ship anytime soon.  As for the other two:  the Aquila is billed as an exploration vessel, and replaces the top turret with a scanning sensor.  Of course, that functionality isn’t in the game yet.  How exploration is going to realistically work in Star Citizen is still something that I haven’t really gotten a good answer for.  Accordingly, I’d be wary of pushing too hard for an exploration ship.  The other ship is the Phoenix, and it’s the “touring” version of the ship.  It reminds me of nothing so much as a high-end private jet.  Definitely not a combat vessel, and is probably more suited for getting people from place to place.  Touring ships and the like are still something I’m not sure about how they’ll work in the game.  Everyone with a pledge-meaning, everyone who plays the game-has a starship.  So the utility of these ships seems dubious, unless gameplay is put in to haul people around, similar to how you’d haul cargo, or theoretically do the still-not-on-the-road-map data running.  Given that one of the concept ships is basically a jumbo 747 for space, I have to think there’d be some purpose to it in the future.

Oh, lest I forget;  the Constellation series also has a snub fighter in the aft section.  At the moment, it doesn’t actually work-but that is about to change, because in the next quarterly patch (meaning, anytime between the end of March to the end of April), the ability to detach the snub fighter from the Constellation and redock it later will be put into the game.  That’s a big deal-because also slated at the same time is preliminary ship-to-space-station docking, which is also a big thing.  That’s outside of the scope of this post, though.

As usual, the folks at Cloud Imperium games put together a commercial for the Constellation, specifically the Aquila variant.  It’s one of their older commercials, but it’s a lot better done than some of the earlier ones.

For, So Swiftly It Flew, The Sight Could Not Follow It In Its Flight (or: Arrow)

There are a lot of starships in Star Citizen.  Yes, I know, that’s like saying “water is wet”.

Nonetheless, perhaps the largest category of such ships would be light fighters.  That’s not entirely shocking.  After all, the smaller ships are the ones that would be considered the least expensive, and as such, a wide variety here would be of benefit-since a lot of players are likely to have at least one or two in their roster over time, whether via pledges or in-game purchases.  (Yes, you can purchase a very large portion of the ships with in-game credits even now.  Not all, but most of the ones currently flyable.)  One of these fighters quickly became a favorite of mine-the Arrow.

The Arrow, at one time, was considered one of the top two light fighters in the game.  It’s traded positions with the other contender regularly, but with the release of the Talon, it might be in the top three now.  (Eventually, I may post on that, but that’s one of the ones that aren’t purchasable in game…for now.)  It’s got speed, maneuverability, a pretty significant amount of firepower for its size.  It’s also apparently made of balsa wood.  Well, all that good had to have some bad to it.

Even so, it’s an absolute joy to fly.  If you grew up in the era of Top Gun, then I can assure you that you definitely feel like that experience in an Arrow.  Its shape allows it to handle atmosphere far better than many other ships, and maintain an excellent speed even in lower atmosphere.  Fuel is a minor issue, as is common with smaller ships; getting from planet to planet will eat up a good chunk of fuel, and may require intermediate stops at R&R stations to refuel before continuing.  Whenever carriers become a thing, Arrows will likely line up for docking spots.  In a dogfight, Arrows are dangerous opponents, and in the hands of a skilled pilot they can take out ships that are out of proportion for its size…at least in PvE.  PvP, as always, depends a lot on the skill of the opposing pilot as much as the type of ship being flown.

The Arrow is a great early purchase in the game, too; it’s pretty affordable for in-game purchase with credits, and can also be rented for a period of time for even more affordable numbers.

Need I add that, like so many of the ships in the game, the developers made a commercial for this ship, too?  One of their better ones-the ship actually looks like it appears here in game.  I can’t guarantee that a pilot flying the ship will be able to do the stuff this pilot does…but I can say that it’s probably very possible.